What a Disney Princess Taught Me About the Spiritual Path

If you ever want to see some funny things, try doing a Vipassana retreat.

Vipassana retreats are silent Buddhist meditation retreats. For ten days, you are in absolute silence, around other people but not acknowledging them. Meditation begins at 4:30 and is interrupted only by meals and one or two hour long breaks throughout the day – and there isn’t much to do during these breaks besides walk around or shower or do your laundry.

I did a vipassana retreat last August in Cambodia, and I gained a lot of wisdom and healing from it, but let’s just say, it also made me pretty loopy. Your brain, left with absolutely nothing to do, begins to dredge up content that’s buried deep in your subconscious. Thoughts and images float up haphazardly. Things you haven’t thought about in years come up.

One thing in particular that kept coming into my head were various verses from the bible that deeply troubled me. I was raised Christian, and for me, there are some areas where Christianity is problematic. One of these is the belief that God is a punishing, authoritarian figure of whom we should be afraid.

Over the years I had come to believe that this idea deeply limits growth. If we are always convinced that there are certain laws, certain behaviors, certain ways we should act according to or else we will be punished by a tyrannical God, then we cannot experience new ways of being – even when these new ways of being may be happier, healthier, or more spiritually connected. We are afraid to make the mistakes we need to in order to understand ourselves and the world better. We are afraid to explore anything outside of what we already know; and we are afraid of people who live differently than we do.

One of the verses that I kept thinking on over and over again in my head was: “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

I felt a little bit at war with myself. One the one hand, this idea was contradictory with what I currently believed about the spiritual path; on the other it seemed like it was deeply embedded somewhere in my psyche.

And it was at this point I received a flash of inspiration. And it came in the form of a Disney princess.

Early on in the movie Mulan, all of the new army recruits are told to climb a pole to retrieve an arrow that has been embedded into the very top. An easy enough task, but then the commander gives them two heavy weights to tie around their hands as they climb, saying that the weights represent “discipline” and “strength.” They don’t seem to help much however; all they do is weigh the person down so much that he can’t climb. It isn’t till the end of the very awesome training montage that Mulan figures out she needs to wrap the weights around the pole and use them to help leverage herself up the pole. The whole idea is very akin to the shamanic concept that we need to make our difficulties into allies. We need to use what tests us to help us grow. That scene gave me chills when I watched it as a little girl, and it still give me chills now.

The message here was this: Fear and trembling can weigh you down, or you can use it to help you rise.

Where we tremble, we heal.

And where we fear, we grow.

Trembling, or shaking, is the natural, physiological healing response of our bodies. When we shake, we are able to move and release emotional energy that when trapped becomes trauma. A deer escaping a predator will, after the threat has passed, shake and tremble to release the fight or flight response. Our bodies, which are animals, need to do this too. Dance and other exercise is incredibly beneficial for those carrying trauma or suffering from depression. In some shamanic healing rituals the healing is only said to have occurred after the shaman or the patient begins to shake, releasing all of the stored energy. To often we're afraid of letting our bodies go completely, which means we can't access this natural physiological response. But if we can begin to practice this letting go, through meditation or a dance practice or even just moving around when we feel emotionally agitated, we will find that our body has an intrinsic wisdom, a wisdom which uses shaking to heal. (If you're interested in learning more about shaking as a way to heal the body, I recommend Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine or Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement by Bradford Keeney.)

And fear? Fear is how you know where your edges are. It's what you bump up against when you're about to grow and expand. I'm not talking about "fear for your life fear" but the worries and anxieties that keep us from doing what we want to do or becoming who we want to be. The trick is to acknowledge that fear and then to do exactly what it's telling you not to do. Fear, however uncomfortable, is just pointing you in the direction of growth. It offers us opportunities to develop courage. And when in a more expanded, open state, fear can transform into excitement and experiences that make us feel highly alive.

So: let us continue to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Let's use them to help us rise.